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Features » July 26, 2013

‘Bargain’ on Immigration Would Feed Prison Profits

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Private prisons have spent millions on federal lobbying, and in the last election season alone, donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to the coffers of governors, federal candidates and both political parties.

The supposed grand bargain of the immigration reform bill is shaping up to be a lucrative deal for prisons. As a compromise between “border security” and “amnesty,” the comprehensive reform plan emerging in Congress ties the “legalization” of millions of migrants to the prospective criminalization of millions more.

The Senate’s reform bill, now being debated in the House, would boost immigration enforcementby beefing up border patrols, militarized barriers, border surveillance, immigration prosecutions and privately run detention facilities. According to Congressional Budget Office (CBO) projections, the original bill approved by the Senate Judiciary Committee “would increase the prison population by about 14,000 inmates annually by 2018.” (The number of “immigration offenders” in federal prison has risen over the past decade to about 22,100 in 2011.) Just before passage, the bill was saddled with the draconian “Hoeven-Corker border security amendment,” which contains harsher, more costly enforcement provisions, including a doubling of border agents to roughly 40,000.

Under the centrist reform plan, some immigrants can gain legal status under certain conditions, such as paying heavy fines andmeeting rigid qualifications for criminal background checks and employment status. Attainiing citizenship could take well over a decade. Meanwhile, to placate conservatives, the bill expands the corporate systems that lock up and dehumanize the migrants who don’t make it over the legal threshold.

In other works, while the bill produces new citizens, the “security” measures would produce more prisoners, conveniently filling tens of thousands of detention beds, many of them run by for-profit contractors on the public’s dime. ​As Stephen Myrow, managing director of the investment research firm ACG Analytics, said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, “Immigration reform will boost revenue at privately operated prisons.”

In other words, ”there is a tremendous incentive [in the Senate bill] for those contractors who could bid for new prison contracts,” saysAlexis Mazón, a researcher with Justice Strategies, a criminal justice watchdog group. And they aren't the only beneficiaries, she notes: Developers and manufacturers of policing and surveillance technologies also stand to gain.

The Senate bill, however, ignores these “lose lose” consequences of mass immigrant detention on civil rights and the economy. Currently, the government prosecutes some 80,000 immigration violation cases each year, and under the committee-approved reform bill, according to CBO, “fully implementing the new border protection provisions under the bill would increase the number of those prosecutions by about 12,000 per year.” Additionally, enhanced border enforcement at a specific portion of the border in Arizona would “triple the number of prosecutions” for violating immigration laws, which would amount to prosecutions of about 35,000 more people annually.

In a follow-up correspondence, lead researcher Greg Hooks writes to In These Times that because state governments tend to suppress labor costs when they privatize prisons, “where state government have embraced privatization, we found that rural prison towns significantly worse off (in terms of employment outcomes). It is likely that the same dynamics would be at work in the immigration detention sector.”

Morevoer, the conditions in prison can be miserable not just for the people behind bars, but for the people keeping them locked down. According to a report on CCA by the advocacy group Grassroots Leadership, private detention centers often achieve cost “efficiency” by “reducing employee benefits and salaries, operating on routinely low and dangerous staff-to-prisoner ratios, and not offering sufficient staff training.”

In Arizona, for example, research by the American Friends Service Committee concludes that inadequate training “can leave employees frustrated and unprepared to handle crises. As a result, these facilities frequently have very high turnover rates and are chronically understaffed. The combination of these factors not only produce a difficult work environment, it can also make these facilities genuinely unsafe for staff, inmates, and the community.”

Another disturbing aspect of the prison economy is the practice of making prisoners work for unconscionably low wages. A 2012 Truthout investigation revealed that many detained migrants work in so-called “voluntary” jobs, doing manual labor for as little as $1 per hour—in other words, wages that make the exploitation of migrants on the outside look kind by comparison.

Lawmakers and communities should go back to the drawing board and develop a piece of legislation that will not only help strengthen the U.S. economy, but also strengthen worker protections, and job growth and job security for immigrants and U.S. citizens alike, and base it on a human rights framework, instead of a national security framework. That would definitely be a lot cheaper also than going the prison and policing route.

While popular criticism of the immigration bill mostly reflects irrational right-wing panic over immigrants “stealing American jobs,” a real danger lurks between the lines: that of expanding an industry that exploits U.S. workers in order to oppress an arbitrarily defined Other.

The alignment between the prison industry’s interests and the centrist reformers in Congress betrays the bill’s underlying motive: not to empower migrants or to lift the economic prospects of U.S. workers, but rather, to adjust the line between “legitimate” and “criminal,” and to let corporations extract a brutal social toll from those who try to cross.

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Michelle Chen is a historian based in New York City, a contributing writer at In These Times and The Nation, a contributing editor at Dissent and a co-producer of the Belabored podcast. She tweets at @meeshellchen.

Great article, exposing the real interests behind Congress' "immigration reform". This bill did not come from the immigrant community or the immigrant rights movement, it comes from Republican Senators, the private prison industry and defense contractors. Keep it up Michelle and In These Times!

Posted by MattGossage on 2013-07-31 14:39:04

Join, we, the people, in holding the line ...

JUST SAY NO

NO AMNESTY NO PROTECTED LEGAL STATUS NO REGISTERED PROVISIONAL IMMIGRANT

we, the people, stand united against amnesty, protected legal status, or whatever else they choose to call it ... this isn't about political party, this isn't about votes, and above all this isn't about race, nationality, ethnicity, color, or religion ... this is about protecting America, our sovereign nation, against an invasion by 10's of millions of illegal immigrants. Illegal immigrants who broke our laws when they crossed our border; or overstayed their visas. Then came document fraud, identity theft, and illegal employment. We are a nation of laws; we do not reward those who wantonly break our laws. We, the people, want our existing federal laws against illegal immigration enforced ... nothing more, nothing less ... it's as simple as that ... it really is.....

citizenship is the highest honor our country can bestow, reserved for those who follow the rules and wait in line